CAA News Today

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

How Can Nonprofits Improve Their Governance?

Governance is coming up more frequently as a subject of conversation and concern among executives and managers in nonprofit organizations. The topic’s rising prominence coincides with more acute financial stresses and vexing strategic conundrums, both of which traditional governance bodies are finding difficult to handle. Executives are duly concerned. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)

Help Desk: Institutional Bias

I freelance in a museum in a major metropolitan area with a diverse population, but the racial demographics of the institution’s staffing seem glaringly segregated. The white​-​collar office employees are mostly white, while black and brown employees make up almost all of the security department. While I haven’t felt any discrimination, the racial dynamics seem obvious and weird to me. What should I do? (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Testing the Possibilities of Online Education with Museum MOOCs

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been hailed as a possible solution to providing low-cost, high-quality education and derided as a destructive reallocation of resources from public education to private corporations. Much existing debate is centered on replacing a physical experience of education with a virtual one; the dispute is also entangled with rising educational costs in the United States. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)

No Rush to “Go Digital”

Quality, cost, and reputation are the top three factors that influence how faculty members pick which textbooks and course materials they assign, according to results from a survey of faculty at two- and four-year institutions. Virtually every respondent for “Going Digital” said their own assessment of the quality of a textbook is an important or a very important factor influencing their course material selection process, followed by the cost and a near tie between comments from colleagues and students or teaching assistants. Less than one-third of respondents said the availability of digital supplements played an important role. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Librarians Find Themselves Caught between Journal Pirates and Publishers

The rise, fall, and resurfacing of a popular piracy website for scholarly-journal articles, Sci-Hub, has highlighted tensions between academic librarians and scholarly publishers. Academics are increasingly turning to websites like Sci-Hub to view subscriber-only articles that they cannot obtain at their college or that they need more quickly than interlibrary loan can provide. (Read more from Chronicle of Higher Education.)

How Digital Storage Is Changing the Way We Preserve History

A few years ago, I started using a digital diary platform called Oh Life. I’d relied on a notebook to jot down daily reflections for years, but this was infinitely more elegant. It was more private than a notebook and less clunky, and the platform even let users upload entries by sending an email. But when I logged on recently, searching for something I’d written on Oh Life years ago, all of my entries had vanished. In fact, the whole site had been shut down, and years of my personal history were gone. (Read more from Vice.)

A Strategy Guide for Second-Round Interviews

Interviewing for an academic job is a grueling, anxiety-ridden, and all-around intense experience for candidates, and the competition at the campus-interview stage is stiffer than ever. The key to staying in the game is to focus on what you can control and carry on when things don’t go your way. (Read more from Vitae.)

What Is SoTL?

Art History Teaching Resources’s 2015 survey found that many art historians are unfamiliar with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). This relative new area of research originated in the 1990s, growing out of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the recognition, elegantly expressed in Ernest Boyert’s Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, that teaching is an essential part of scholarly activity. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)